On 6/10/2011 5:21 PM, Ian Piumarta wrote:
On Jun 9, 2011, at 02:58 , Julian Leviston wrote:
reason that the iPad feels faster than a modern desktop operating system: it
was quicker to get to the user interaction point.
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.131.1805
"The responsiveness of exploratory programming environments (such as the Smalltalk
programming environment) allows the programmer to concentrate on the task at hand rather
than being distracted by long pauses caused by compilation or linking."
this is also partly where dynamic script loading and eval can be nifty...
say, one is using an app, and then in the console they type in a
command, say:
;load("scripts/myscript.bs");
and can quickly edit the file, hit the uparrow in the console to
re-enter the prior command, and observe the results.
or, the ability to directly type script commands into the console to
observe results, ...
for example, in the above, the ";load(...);" line actually is a string
passed to eval (the initial ';' basically being an "eval this" marker,
mostly as it was shorter to type than "eval", and also less awkward than
having to change console modes between "eval mode" and "shell mode").
the evaluated fragment the loads and compiles/executes the indicated
script file.
all of these things can be convenient.
although, sadly, the need to regularly rebuild ones' codebase is not a
difficult thing to escape (fragment evaluation, sadly, ends up mostly
just being used for testing and controlling things, rather than a
programming strategy in its own right).
but, I was also left recently thinking some about the possible
"strangeness" of me basically creating a vaguely Lisp-like programming
environment within C.
sadly, one can forget how alien this may seem to some people, and wonder
why "a pointer which remembers its value's data type" is apparently such
a difficult concept to explain (nevermind all the various things one can
do with cons-cells and lists...).
after around a decade of programming this way, it starts to seem just as
natural as using static types, and the relative pain of "malloc()" and
"free()" gradually starts to become a distant memory...
or such...
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